Looking down the line a few hundred years possibly. Lets assume we get the population stabilized and even reduced. Lets assume we come up with enough clean energy to meet 25% of what we need. Our oil and coal reserves are depleted and we are forced to start burning possibly wood, trash and fuels made from things like corn and sugar cane. We would still be dealing wit the carbon problem. That’s one of the reasons I have been asking about moving water around on continents and using nitrogen fertilizers to speed up plant growth. It would seem our only real solution would be to create a massive increase in the planets bio mass. Creating forests in places that are now deserts etc. This would have enormous environmental impacts. How much would humanity be willing to change the earth in order for humans to survive?
First off somewhere in the next 30-70 years we’ll have Fusion power (it looks like).
Beamed Solar power from orbital panels is a possibility.
We keep getting better at energy efficiency and this is an important part of the energy future. This includes advancements in electrical transmission.
When every roof of new houses are roll out solar panels, we will greatly increase this source of power.
Keep in mind battery tech is changing rapidly with some major improvements in the nearish future. This will help greatly with solar & wind power.
Worst case there is always more but better Fission.
edited in line breaks, it looks ugly and annoying to read, sorry about that
Controller nuclear fusion has been 25-30 years away for the last 70 years. About every ten years like clockwork some new innovation comes along that makes it seem like we are just on the cusp of being able to achieve controlled fusion and then it peters out as the technology doesn’t pan out or new problems are presented. The current international effort ( International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor or ITER) is both over budget and massively beyond schedule (first plasma was originally supposed to be in 2015, is now estimated for 2025 but even that looks doubtful) but even if it end up being successful at achieving Q=10 it is really just a testbed for controlled fusion with no provisions for extracting useful power from it.
The follow-on proposals for a DEMO project to demonstrate actual power generating technologies are only conceptual and none are even optimistically estimated to be online before 2050. The ITER/DEMO architecture requires building a power generating reactor on a massive scale with enormous capital investment and high technical requirements, which means it will be beyond the reach of most nations, and likely at a cost that would be commercially prohibitive, requiring government subsidy or operation. The DEMO proposals are for a thermal power output of ~2000 MW, which not much more than a conventional pressurized or boiling water fission reactor, but with massive operating costs.
There are a bunch of commercial startups trying to come up with smaller, more scaleable systems to achieve controlled nuclear fission using smaller, high field strength superconducting magnets, machine learning algorithms, or what can be charitably described as “alternative physics”; thus far, none have demonstrated anything close to even breakeven levels of energy, much less the levels necessary to sustain a plasma or repeatedly produce fusion conditions and extract enough power to maintain itself.
I was once a strong advocate for and enthusiast of nuclear fusion, and I think it still merits substantial and consistent research investment, but I would not bet any amount of money on fusion being commercialized on any timescale useful to replace hydrocarbon fuels or to make an impact on global climate change.
The concept of solar power satellites (SPS) was promoted by Gerald K. O’Neill purely as justification for Lunar mining and ultimately orbital habitats in the Earth-Moon Lagrange points. It has never been demonstrated as being practical on a large scale or commercially viable without a pre-existing space-based mining and manufacturing infrastructure. Nor does particularly make sense for wide scale power production since essentially what it does is collect sunlight, concentrated it into microwaves, and beams them through the atmosphere. Other than a very modest gain in efficiency over radiant sunlight by beaming through a ‘window’ in atmospheric absorption spectrum and being able to transmit power directly to nightside Earth, it offers no benefits over ground-based solar power at astronomical cost.
The downsides of wide scale expansion of nuclear fission are manifest, but the biggest showstopper is just that we do not have the means to enrich natural uranium into reactor-grade nuclear fuel for even the nuclear power plants currently operating in the United States, much less expand that capability by three or more orders of magnitude sufficient to replace all coal, oil, and natural gas power production. Nor does anyone want new enrichment and nuclear fuel processing facilities built in their neighborhood, which is understandable given that most closed enrichment and processing facilities are now Superfund cleanup sites,
Advanced nuclear fission systems, and particularly complete burn up systems like the molten salt reactor that can also use non-enriched or low-enriched fuels (and thorium, which is more widely available) are a good area to invest in and can provide reliable baseload, but even this would not be a comprehensive replacement for hydrocarbon fuels in the required timescale.
Stranger
Who says we’ll need as much energy in the future as we do now?
Here’s a brand-new invention that has the potential to save on energy use.
As for an expansion of cultivation of crops for biofuels, this is problematic for multiple reasons, not the least of which is the destruction of natural woodlands, wetlands, and prairies—all of which are enormous carbon sinks—to provide the amount of agricultural land to grow these crops. This is very much “stealing from Peter to pay Paul”, which can already be seen by the ecological horror of clearcutting land for palm oil plantation and cultivation in Indonesia, Mayasia, Nigeria, and elsewhere. Conventional biofuels are also problematic because the low energy density means that they either have very limited thermodynamic efficiency or require extensive processing and conversion into a useful fuel, e.g. the conversion of corn, soya, or sugar cane into ethanol via fermentation, which is only commercially feasible only because of government subsidy.
Some work has been done on next generation fuel production, such as trying to genetically engineer algae into producing high amounts of lipids that would be readily extractable and useable in diesel cycle engines, bacteria that can efficiently break down waste and “hog fuel” into methane and thence conversion to methanol or dimethyl ether, or the hypothetical “glucose economy” advocated by former Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, which is great in theory but nobody actually knows how we would build industrial technology to work with that.
Photovoltaic solar power would actually be adequate to provide all current and projected energy needs if we had some means to store and transport it from where it is collected to where it is needed, e.g. very inexpensive batteries (that aren’t resource limited like lithium anode-based electrochemical batteries), high voltage DC transmission systems, conversion into liquid fuels, et cetera, all of which are technologies that could potentially be matured and deployed at scale in the reasonably near time scale. The biggest problem with PV solar are the economics of it, which when used in the context of conventional electrical power generation actually results in undercutting itself; see Varun Sivaram’s Taming the Sun for an extensive discussion of this and what can be done to address it.
Stranger
Our high-tech global civilization is an unsubstainable blip in history. It will crash, hard, and never recover.
Also:
I think that whether we voluntarily restrict our fossil fuel consumption or are forced to, the future of humanity is going to involve reduced energy consumption through both more efficient utilization and reduction in the consumption of energy hungry goods and services.
Maybe fusion finally grows into a viable technology, but considering the amount of research it has taken to get to massivef facilities that just barely break even on energy in - energy out (disregarding all other construction and operation costs), that is by no means certain.
Maybe we can puzzle together hydro, solar, wind and storage technology enough to replace most of what we use today.
But I think it’s much more likely the extreme convenience of using 200-300 years to use up energy stored over thousands of years all over the globe millions of years ago will never be matched.
Why do we need to find sufficient clean energy resources in the future? The clean energy resources we’ve already found would be enough, if we’d just use them.
These have been mature for a long time (like the 70s). The Chinese are building ultra-high voltage DC systems that seem to work.
It undercuts everything, though. PV+storage will probably kill most gas peaker plants, for one thing.
I think people have yet to figure out how to best take advantage of the low prices PV offers. High energy industries like desalination, aluminum refinement, hydrogen electrolysis, etc. do not need electrical storage. Instead, they should be designed to scale up and down easily with the available power input. The focus should be on reducing capital costs of the equipment rather than absolute efficiency.
Oh, and moving from GQ to IMHO.
Which is why I said:
Rebuilding the US electrical distribution grid into a fully integrated continent-wide system would allow solar power generated in the Southwest to be delivered to states in the Upper Midwest and Northeast, and even potentially sold to high latitudes in Canada where solar power collection isn’t practical. It would take a little development and a lot of infrastructure but is something that could easily be deployed inside of a decade, unlike building hundreds of nuclear fission plants or betting on the viability of controlled nuclear fusion anytime in the foreseeable future.
Solar isn’t perfect, and the current level of industrialization would still require substantial baseload power generating capability, but solar is highly scaleable and cheap and easy to deploy provided you have land area for it. It is unquestionably the fastest way to replace the most polluting power generating sources while improving the next generation of nuclear fission plants or coming up with other energy storage and delivery technologies.
The problem is that during peak generation, solar power can actually become so abundant that it becomes cost negative. This is a regulatory and usage problem rather than a technical one, but it reflects the problems wi integrating solar into commercial market-driven power generating systems. See the above-referenced book for an extensive discussion including actual examples such as the SunEdison yieldco fiasco.
Stranger
Sure, just pointing out that the “matured” part is less relevant for that particular technology. Liquid fuel conversion OTOH needs much more maturation before deployment at scale.
I think this is a highly underappreciated point for people doing projections. Although I’d very much like nuclear fission to be expanded, it inherently requires a giant upfront capital expenditure. You’re going to spend $10B or more before the first joule is produced. That also makes it far more exposed to cost overruns. Solar, on the other hand, can be built progressively. This makes it far easier to fund and more resilient to any issues encountered along the way.
Right; hence my point about reworking some types of industry. I hope it means we can get much cheaper aluminum, though, rather than the slack being picked up by Bitcoin…
Ultimately, I think we are going to have to live through some difficulties in the transition. A PV (and wind) powered economy will simply look different than one powered by baseload power. Some things will be cheap, others expensive, which essentially means that some industries will die or shrink and others will thrive.
The book looks interesting; I might give it a read.
It is pretty technical (not so much the solar technology as the economics behind it) and extensively endnoted with references, so it isn’t casual reading but it really should be mandatory reading for anyone advocating for solar power. The author is openly an advocate for PV solar but is forthright about the challenges that need to be overcome to expand PV solar to an industrial scale versus just residential rooftop installations and show pony projects.
Stranger
You might underestimate what I consider casual reading <glances at Feynman Lectures sitting on end table>.
What you described can be seen in charts in this article:
That is, population shot up thanks to greater use of energy and material resources, and if both are lacking, then population will decline due to higher death rates.
At the same time, greater use per capita takes place due to more prosperity, which also contributes to declining birth rates.
Meanwhile, more use leads to more pollution, which in turn threatens resource and energy availability.
Finally, what’s not mentioned is that increasing economic output is driven by competitive capitalism, which involves continuous and even increasing growth. And that has to take place in a planet with physical limitations.
There’s plenty of resources on the planet to give 10 billion people a first-world quality of life while having far less impact on the planet. The problem is that we’re unbelievably stupid and wasteful in our use of resources.
Agriculture uses 100x to 1000x as much water as it needs to. And the ratio is about the same for land use. Around 40% of the land in the US is for some kind of agriculture; if we switched to indoor farming it we’d be using under half a percent of the area. And it could use more degraded areas instead of prime fertile land. These farms would need more energy, but freeing up all that space would make room for solar farms. We still wouldn’t need anywhere close to the same amount of land for solar, plus it would itself damage the environment less. The remaining land would just go back to nature.
The basic materials for first world living are incredibly prevalent: iron, aluminum, silicon, etc. There are some like copper that would be nice to have more of, but have alternatives (aluminum can take over a large fraction of copper use). Others, like cobalt, are in pretty short supply, but also have alternatives (cobalt-free batteries are becoming popular). There may be a few things that we have to do without, but we’ll gain a lot as well.
Capitalism is just an optimization tool. It doesn’t require constant growth or anything like that, even if that’s what Wall St. currently rewards. Of course, we’re obligated to set basic constraints on capitalism, such as placing a price on externalities. We can be very confident that capitalism will reward transferring internal costs to external ones if the external ones are unpriced. So let’s not do that.
Aside from that, the biggest risk we face is misinformation. Lying psychopaths like the Rupert Murdochs of the world manage to confuse the public into thinking big problems are non-problems and vice versa. And so we spend resources on exactly the wrong thing. Unfortunately, there’s no obvious technological solution to this.
I like the idea of being able to design industry that scales up and down easily with available power input, but that seems at odds with the goal of reducing capital costs. If you want to design a plant that smelts, say, 1 million tonnes per year of aluminum (this is a made up number, I have no idea how big these plants typically are), then you’d need to average ~114 tonnes per hour, every day of the year. I am sure a plant designed to run 24/7 at 114tph is going to be significantly less capital intensive than a plant design to run for 8 hours at 240tph, 8 hours at 100tph and 8 hours at 0tph each day. So the question is whether it is more cost effective to build excess capability within these plants vs. building electricity storage.
While a hundredfold to thousandfold decrease in water use for irrigation is theoretically possible, the reality is that achieving even an order of magnitude reduction in water use would be miraculous. The notion of transforming all agriculture into indoor farming may seem appealing if your exposure to cropping is limited to TechCrunch videos and Silicon Valley startups promoting how they are going to build giant indoor farms with automated cultivation, but the sheer scope of actually transitioning all field agriculture to indoor cultivation is daunting to even consider. Indoor cultivation makes sense for increasing the yield of delicate fruits and boutique cultivars with short growing seasons and consistently high market value, but indoor cropping of corn, wheat, potatoes, sugar beets, sugarcane, and other staple crops is not remotely feasible.
There is an argument to be made for realigning the crops we do grow; for instance, the subsidies for growing corn have artificially fed the market for stock ethanol (used for increasing the RON of gasoline and for industrial purposes) and high fructose corn syrup (used in processed food); without those subsidies, those products would be much less appealing. Corn is not a particularly nutritious feedstock for either human consumption or livestock feed, and the low cost of it has discouraged research into methods for using waste cellulistic feedstock for industrial ethanol production. Just eliminating the subsidies and encouraging farms to diversify as well as implement more efficient irrigation methods would be a significant step toward more efficient water use. Of course, to do that you’ll be facing off with not only corporate farming and processed food manufacturing interests who are highly invested in the current system but also the major agrochemical and agricultural biotech companies that are just as powerful as, and us similar tactics to, the petroleum industry.
Saying that “Capitalism is just an optimization tool,” is pretty reductionist, betting the question “Optimizing for what?” Your Ayn Rand-espousing, libertarian-identifying, hedge fund managing trader is going to answer that question with one word, “Profit!” The problem with the profit motive, however, is that it is very much an instant gratification impulse; people (regardless of espoused ideology) will strive for personal profit in the near term even if it is unsustainable or detrimental over the long term, and especially if projections of the future are unclear or have a wide range of variance.
Setting aside discussions about what constitutes a “free market” and the benefits thereof, capitalism is fundamentally a system for collecting together sufficient resources to build and maintain industrial-scale systems, and even self-described “Marxist” economies have to do this in order to maintain an industrial society (hence why co-ops work fine at smaller scales but no one has ever run a collectivist national economy). The failure of virtually all Marxist/Communist systems to maintain functioning economies isn’t because they can’t access or utilize capital—although they are often stunningly inept at making good use of material resources; the Soviet Union should have been awash in proceeds and products from their natural wealth, but the economy was so incompetently and corruptly managed that it stumbled its way from one economic crisis to another)—but rather because they seem to naturally veer toward authoritarianism in which mistakes and corruption are hidden from view, covered with a veneer of increasingly difficult-to-repeat-with-sincerity sloganeering and impossibly optimistic economic forecasts.
However, when producers in a “market economy” (whether the refer to themselves as capitalists or otherwise) have sufficient power or the ability to sway forces that influence the markets in order to amplify perceived market value vastly beyond any realizable profit from goods or services produced, that “optimizing” becomes “influencing market perception to optimize valuation right before I cash out and let it crash.” That is modern, unconstrained capitalism, and it would make Adam Smith gag in horror to see it in action.
“…placing a price on externalities” such that the true costs are born by the producer is a good and necessary “constraint”, but one fundamental limitation of markets is that they are by definition reactive; the market responds to occurrences or projections of near-term impacts, and does not project out needs into the far future, and certainly not transformative changes to the system that would alter the structure of the market itself. Although “capitalism” is often considered synonymous with “innovation”, virtually every major technical innovation from computing to battery technology to advances in biotechnology have their roots in goverment-funded academic research or government research labs, often as a nascent concept of which the realized capability was beyond any rational projection. The need to support research and build out the use of novel energy technologies isn’t something that can be handed over to “the market” to do, because “the market” dictates using whatever technology will yield the most profit soonest rather than what would actually serve society best over the long term. Using “externalities” to control the market is like using a choke collar on an aggressive dog; it works fine as long as you are paying attention to the dog but you should really be conditioning the dog to be less aggressive.
Stranger
Yeah, this. The primary obstacles to widespread nuclear power, for example, are political, not technological or economic.
It’s certainly possible that those obstacles will persist even as other cheap energy sources are tapped out, but that seems unlikely to me.
Solar + batteries + nuclear fission baseload would get us thousands of years of runway without dramatic technological improvements.
Sorry, I was unclear. What I meant is that if, for example, you have to build twice as many smelters because they are only running at a 50% duty cycle, then it becomes more important to reduce the cost of those individual smelters. If the power is cheap when they are running, then there might be some opportunities to decrease costs at the expense of efficiency.
How exactly this plays out is going to depend on the industry. Consider desalination as an easier problem to think about. While the desalination itself is going to cost more if only run at a partial duty cycle, there’s all sorts of auxiliary infrastructure which does not. For instance, you have to get rid of the brine via a pipe that goes out to sea. But that can be sized for average load, not peak load, with a cheap storage tank smoothing out the load. The same goes for the fresh water output.
There’s lots and lots of stuff to think about here. Unfortunately, we have a lot of infrastructure built without variable price energy in mind.